Gillian on Film, Again

If you haven’t heard of Gillian Flynn, or at least Gone Girl, we can just assume you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years. But assuming you do know about her books, and the latest movie, do you also know about the other movies in the works, the TV show, and the sequel? Well, read on and we’ll fill you in…

First, in case you’ve recently come out from under the aforementioned rock to join civilization, here’s what you need to know about Gillian Flynn…
She’s an author, and now also a screenwriter, who was born in Kansas City, Missouri (where a lot of her books take place). As a young girl she was painfully shy and escaped into the world of books and the horror films her father took her to see. Such interests have molded her into an author of uniquely dark fiction that takes seemingly normal towns filled with seemingly normal people and twists it into something deliciously eerie and broken. Initially she attempted a career in police journalism after getting a Masters in degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. Shortly thereafter, realizing it wasn’t her strength, Flynn moved on to entertainment journalism working for Entertainment Weekly where she wrote about films for 10 years. Fortunate for us, she was laid-off in 2008 and shifted focus to promoting and publishing the 3 books she’d written during her downtime with EW.

All three books, Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009) and Gone Girl (2012), pull you deep into a richly dark story with numerous twists and turns told from the perspective of a woman with a layered past. These novels have each done so well individually, but most notably Gone Girl has reached unmatched success with over 8 million copies sold and a film adaptation which grossed over $350 million. It’s a tricky story to tell on film, but to the credit of director David Fincher (of The Social Network and Fight Club fame) he worked with Flynn as the screenwriter for the entire film.

And now both Sharp Objects and Dark Places are being brought to the screen. Sharp Objects is being turned into a one-hour serialized drama for television. A perfect fit for this “golden age” of television. The producers have had the rights since 2010 as they struggled between whether to tell the story as a feature film or television program. So maybe they’ll end up with a movie after all, who knows? But hopefully this comes to air sooner rather than later. And rumor has it they hope to cast Kiernan Shipka as the antagonist.

Also, filming for Dark Places has already wrapped, staring Charliez Theron and Chloe Mortez. And in fact, without advanced notice, the trailer was just released in France where it will premier in just one month. Theron’s definitely not what we’d pictured for Libby Day (Kate Mara would have been our first choice), and why is she wearing that trucker hat in every scene? Originally the film was set for release in the US this fall, but with the Gone Girl buzz still very much alive in the media it’s been pushed to next spring. And although Flynn didn’t write the script for this adaptation, she’s apparently given it her seal of approval.

And there’s even talk of a Gone Girl sequel! It’s true. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie you know that the ending reads a bit more like the start of a new chapter than the end of another. So Flynn has said that if the whole team was on-board (Affleck, Pike and Fincher) she’d be in for a sequel. Fingers crossed!

Ultimately it’s the strong, flawed, cunning, smart, powerfully broken female characters that bring us back to Flynn’s work. She manages to capture their inner most thoughts so fully—good, bad and ugly—that she’s even received criticism for creating female protagonists who are too unflattering. Well, in the words of Flynn, ″The one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing.″ We’ve loved reading Gillian Flynn’s books, and can’t wait to see more of her beautiful characters on the pages and up on screen. Thanks for reading!